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Measures, Steps, Spaces: the places of music

Posted: May 27th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Measures, Steps, Spaces: the places of music

14th International Meeting of Music and Media, Sao Paulo, 10-12 September, 2018

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me…” The instigating quotation from Pascal’s Thoughts refers to the new order of the universe in the seventeenth century as geocentrism is abandoned to adopt heliocentrism. The thought dividing the world into two parts: “from the heavens” (upper) and “from the earth” (lower, corruptible) was broken. The beliefs instituted by the Church were shaken. From then on, the closed celestial world, which was ending, becoming giant, infinite … As it is well known, from then on the world began to be perceived and felt in other contours. For centuries we have seen that both concepts and perceptions of time and space expand their boundaries, arousing curiosity and giving rise to important concerns in the field of science and art. Thinking in the very particular case of the forms of creation, appreciation and musical performance, we verified that these dimensions space-time passed, through the centuries, by different forms of conception. Concerning to musical composition, space has gradually become a parameter, giving rise to other categories (environment, sound landscapes, etc.). Gradually, aesthetic appreciation was also conditioned by the various technical means that emerged (devices, listening places, sound territories) and their possibilities of use. These same conditions would imply changes in performance (a drama to three, Zumthor would say) irreversibly. In another aspect, space unfolds its physical dimension into symbolic, scrutinizing itself in places and territories. Songs, practices and repertoires are limited to their propagation capacity and to the groups that produce them, configuring acoustic communities. According to the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, space allows the construction of territories: practiced, lived, disputed. Their constructions of meaning are guided by the uses and appropriations that groups and subjects make, in a complex elaborated between fixed and flows.

In contemporary times, space is not conceived, therefore, as a closed reference, but permeated by local and global flows and the meanings of cosmopolitanism. Space is considered as a field of possibilities since locus of interrelationships, encounters, circulations and processes are always dynamic and unfinished. In another direction, the acoustic universe collides with the space community. The early attempts for solving that were restricted to the elaboration of laws to delimit the invasion of noise, being the closed space the route of escape of the noise present in the open air environments. Many of these themes were published 40 years ago in book by composer R. Murray Schafer, for whom the world is a great composition. In publishing the book, spaces and lanes of circulation of sound events were, according to Schafer, rather congested. Still, other forms of sound production and circulation were still to come … Also in the 1970s, Henri Lefebvre in his work The Right to the City, proposed a conception of a city that should not be determined by the might and planning of planners, but instead where daily life of the inhabitants had a fundamental place in the formulation of urban living. The 14th International Encounter of Music and Media invites people interested to discuss and study themes related interface music / space interfaces in its multiple approaches. Given its breadth, we propose a division into three branches, as we state, below:

Branch 1 – Compositional aesthetics and ways of listening: Historically, it may be noted that over the centuries the world population only grew, leading to the expansion of villages to large metropolises. Life in the countryside also gave way to the city, compacting the urban space. These changes caused great mutations in the constitution of the space (s) but, above all, in the forms of adequacy of the space dimension: distance, extension, time, has become scales in different standards. Tracing and traversing, people communicate sonorously and musically through their voices, footsteps and machines, leaving their mark (sonorous) along the way. This branch is supposed to bring together works that deal with the planning and poetic appropriation of the physical space, making possible the composition and reconfiguration of sound and musical landscapes, such as the architecture of buildings allows, limits, conforms the sensitivity of listening and its performance: from the theatrical stage, to the sports stadium; from the recording studio to the satellite transmission; still: as the processes of musical creation are amplified with artifacts of an artistic nature, such as “jardin sonore”, urban installations, mobiles and sculptures.

 Branch 2 – Music, cultures and territories: This branch is dedicated to gather and discuss works that relate music and musical practices to the notions of use and appropriation of spaces thought not only by the elaborations imposed by the powers (ideological, political, urban), but in their uses and appropriations by the subjects, configuring territorialities and production of local senses. (Re) invention of urban territories, construction of places of memory, public policies and spaces, forms of articulation e embodiment / performances / spaces, processes of (re) territorialization, imaginary linked to the spatialities, uses and disputes over the the city places, notions of creativity / innovation related to the cities. These are some of the themes that, articulated to the music and its practices, will be contemplated here.

Branch 3 – Urbanism, architectonics and creative poetics:The topics presented above plead in addition to theoretical discussions, propositions and initiatives. This branch brings together proposals for experimentation and practices involving the relations between landscapes and territories, environment and architecture, in their constructive conceptions, under the artistic or functional aspect: urban interventions, installations, acoustic projects, etc. Modalities of participation:

Oral communications. Poster sessions. Audiovisual sessions.

Paper submissions: April 20 – June 5, 2018. Acceptance notification: July 3rd., 2018.

More information: https://www.doity.com.br/14encontromusimid/